A semantic evaluation of ideological positioning in awareness campaign against Covid-19 pandemic in Nigeria and Iraq from appraisal framework perspective

Abstract

The outbreak of novel corona virus known as covid-19 stimulates discussions across the mainstream and new media with underlying purpose to educate people to take precautionary measures against the pandemic. As scholars see ideology as an ingredient for all discourse, the present paper deploys the appraisal framework to evaluate the attitudinal positions in forming ideology through which the language users aligned themselves in what they are conveyed about the covid-19 to their audience to either favour or disfavour particular viewpoints. The study which generates ten texts on the covid-19 from mainstream media and equal number of texts from new media in Nigeria and Iraq reveals in its findings that ‘interpersonal’ mode of meaning-making dominates the covid-19 discourse when compared to the domains of attitudinal and dialogistic meaning-making using appraisal framework. The ideologically evaluation of the data shows that linguistic expressions on the Covid-19 regardless of the geographical location of the language users encourage solidarity on common issues or challenges about the pandemic by persuading people to take common action against these issues or challenges.